When will right hate Hillary again?

Her poll numbers are staggering. Fellow Democrats fear her. So do some Republicans. The main question now is, when will the right start hating Hillary Clinton again and kick a “Stop HRC” movement into high gear?

You could hear the sounds of the ignition being turned during the past 10 days as an illness that led to a concussion (under circumstances that the public still knows little about) forced Clinton to cancel Senate testimony about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. That led to charges of a cover-up from some dependably anti-Clinton quarters, such as the New York Post and former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton.

A blog post Wednesday by The Weekly Standard — promptly blared across the Drudge Report with the headline, “Where’s Hillary?” — questioned the scant explanation out of Clinton’s camp of her two-week public absence this month.

But there was a cautious quality to much of that criticism. The language used by the Post, a longtime Clinton antagonist, was tough but not disrespectful. And Sen. Lindsey Graham said conservatives peddling the idea that Clinton faked her illness to get out of testifying need to knock it off. “I think that’s inappropriate and not true,” the South Carolina Republican said last week.

That all fed a sense that the engine of the once vaunted anti-Hillary machine still seems stuck in neutral.

She is scheduled to have a rain date before the Senate in January, but some of the passion over Benghazi may have dissipated by then. A special report led to the resignation of lower-tier State Department officials and did not target Clinton. And when she testifies, some of her old Senate Republican colleagues may be mindful of being too tough at a public hearing, meaning that unless she makes a misstep, she likely will get a respectful greeting.

Which leaves a status quo in place that would have been unthinkable for conservatives just four short years ago: The anti-Hillary Clinton industrial-entertainment complex, a source of income and headlines for conservatives over much of the past two decades, has been dormant while she’s been at the State Department. There has been no Clinton in elected office, a constant in American political life since the 1990s, for four years. The secretary of State has generally become an apolitical and deeply popular figure — and Republican nominee Mitt Romney spent much of 2012 lionizing the Clinton legacy.

Some Republicans believe it’s only a matter of time before she appears in more direct-mail appeals. A second Hillary presidential campaign seems eminently possible, and it’s already prompting a fundraising appeal from the PAC ActRight, helmed by National Organization for Marriage President Brian Brown, who recently wrote to his list: “The time to start planning for the defeat of Hillary Clinton is right now.”